Mary Lynn Kittelson

Sounding the Soul

The Art of Listening

What if we conceived of ourselves as auditory beings rather than visual ones? Our attitude would shift, and so would our availability to the world, inside and out. Centering in sound entails receptive interaction with the unconscious, a participatory style of consciousness. Rather than “bringing light” to unconscious energies, it means being resonant to it, being alive.

In this delightful, phenomenological account, Kittelson writes in lively pursuit of the language of hearing, an ode to the persistent primacy of the ear. It’s right here, she says, just around the corner from our noses.

Kittelson’s ear awareness finds side-doors into the topic. She lets us in on a secret as intriguing as Freud’s footnote about the gradually diminishing sense of smell in human beings: we have a lapsed instinct for interiority. For turning inward, for spiraling deep into the dark, for following evocative reverberations to their source. - from the Foreword by Nor Hall, Ph.D.

Mary Lynn Kittelson is a Jungian analyst in private practice in St. Paul, Minnesota. She studied music and literature and has Masters degrees in English literature and human development. From 1982 to 1990, she trained as an analyst in Zurich, Switzerland, where teaching English as a foreign language and “seeing” clients in German sharpened her ear. In addition to her practice, the author teaches and lectures on dreams and image work, animals in our soul, the American psyche, auditory imagery, and other Jungian topics, especially the shadow and child as image, archetype and “reality.” She likes to garden, experiment vocally, write, listen, and figure things out.